Still Alright! Supergrass

Share

“Can I go to the toilet for this one?” asks Danny Goffey, before standing to attention, flicking up his collar and slamming the door behind him. “I’ve answered that one ten times now today,” he adds, each word getting quieter as he walks down the staircase in search of the rest room. It’s taken twenty minutes for our conversation to touch on the subject of Britpop, and how, over a decade since the movement, and many of its founders, popped, Supergrass have continued to grow into one of Britain’s most treasured bands. “I don’t know,” sighs Gaz Coombes, the band’s frontman, eyeing up his own escape route. As Coombes’ response crumbles in his attempt to come up with an original answer, Mick Quinn, the band’s bassist, puts it simply: “Luck.”

“Maybe luck, yeah,” concedes Coombes, invigorated again. “We’re all close, we’ve been friends for years, me and Bobs (Rob Coombes, the bands keyboardist) are brothers. We’ve had things in the past that have really shaken the band but never enough to destroy it. It’s just life, you get through these things and you come out stronger. I think we’ve come out stronger quite a few times from various situations.” Goffey, now relieved, marches back in and takes his seat again.

As they sit in the elegant confines of a West London pub, Supergrass have their reasons for so flippantly annulling any talk of the past: at the moment, quite refreshingly, it’s all about the now. All now in their thirties and looking surprisingly alert following a whirlwind four-week tour previewing tracks off their sixth studio album, ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’, the only time Coombes, Goffey or Quinn reflect on the past is to make reference to their last album – 2005’s dark and heavily introspective, ‘Road To Rouen’. And then, it’s only because it is hard to ignore the impact that that record has had on their latest.

Indeed, to understand ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’, you have to go back to the tail end of 2004. Following the release of ‘Supergrass Is 10: The Best Of '94-'04’ – a collection of their finest singles since 1994 - Supergrass are in a purpose built facility in France recording their next studio album but something isn’t quite right, or, at least the same as it used to be. For the first time personal issues – the Coombes’ brothers lose their Mother and Goffey, for a multitude of reasons, loses interest – come between the band and making music. Although Goffey admits today that he briefly left the group because he was “finding it hard to control” his personal life with “being really productive in the band”, the group did eventually release, ‘Road To Rouen’. Aptly entitled, it was met with a cautious reception from critics and fans alike because it wasn’t the instantly accessible Supergrass that people had, perhaps naively, come to expect.

I ask whether, in hindsight, ‘Road To Rouen’ was a record that the band needed to make in order to move on. “I don’t think we planned it like that, I think we’d just released a ‘best of’ and I think if we released a record like the one we’ve just made straight after our ‘best of’ then it would seem a bit odd,” says Quinn, before conceding that “with what had gone on in our personal lives”, there was no interest in making ‘Road To Rouen’ a “happy record”.

Coombes has a different take. “I think we were a bit defiant as well at the time,” he says, passionately. “We were a little bit reluctant with the ‘Supergrass Is 10’ CD because it can really quickly display a band as a pop band.” Goffey, joking, interrupts: “Even more reluctant in hindsight that it didn’t sell millions and millions of copies.” Coombes frowns at his band mate before continuing. “Yeah, but my point being that ‘Road To Rouen’ was definitely a little bit of a fuck off in a way, you know. I think we just wanted people to see that our band is more than just a bunch of singles that were quite commercial – because our band is more than that to us.”

At 32 and the father of one daughter, Coombes, who formed Supergrass alongside Goffey and Quinn in 1993, is the staunchest defender against people who suggest that they’ve never managed to re-create the magic of ‘Alright’ and debut single ‘Caught By the Fuzz’. Throughout our conversation, maybe subconsciously, it’s he who raises the ‘issues’ that people have had with the band. “It’s a bit of a running gag really, isn’t it,” he says at one point, with a brave smile, “everyone’s second favourite band.” And again, when talk returns to ‘Road To Rouen’. “Why should we provide that – another album with singles on it – we’d just be a one-dimensional band that just provide one thing.” Does he still find criticism hard to take? “I suppose that’s something that you get more comfortable with as you carry on,” he responds, before his thoughts turn to the current record, “but it’s having belief and confidence and I think the belief in this record is really, really high, and the confidence is flying high – so you just kind of go with it, it feels good.”

Things started to feel this way for Coombes and the rest of Supergrass as they came to the end of touring ‘Road To Rouen’ – a tour that also saw Goffey reinvigorated by music once again. “We changed the whole sort of touring set up, we did stuff that was actually really fun and it kind of mended itself really,” he says, before adding with a smile, “I stopped doing so much cocaine as well.”